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Comment by aristofun | Hacker News Reader

Most probably you deeply don’t care about the company’s mission in general. You just enjoy some specific activities, being a professional.

The more fellow programmers i see, the more im convinced it’s not enough for such a demanding job.

You have to personally care to some degree about your users, about the general problem you’re solving, you need to feel meaning in what you do.

Then oncalls etc also start show some meaning and value to the bigger picture.

Without it — you ll face plenty of energy sinks in any discipline.

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I take pride in caring about what matters most for customers (such as end customer impact during production incidents, but also in general prioritization). This is why it's stressful to be on call at times, because I don't let myself truly relax and do normal life things outside of work (because taking a laptop everywhere isn't compatible with some activities).

It's possible to believe in a company mission, and even to drink the company Koolaid to the extent one might romanticize on YN (I did in my early days, while also resentful of the demands of oncall), but it is not necessary to give all the hours of your day to any company. Also, I do enjoy engineering, so your hypothesis is also off base in that regard (in fact I don't really care much for the idea of professionalism). I know plenty of accomplished and happy people for whom work is just one part of their lives and not their defining attribute.

> Most probably you deeply don’t care about the company’s mission in general.

Nope. Of course I don't. It's just a job. I am paid to deliver value during a pre-agreed set of hours and nothing more. I will do my work to the best of my ability during that time, after which I dngaf. The company, in turn, will treat me as a non-entity when it suits (eg. will lay me off in hard times). It is for the owner of the company/stakeholders to care about the mission, since they are the ones who profit from that care (and from the naive care of others who have no stake and yet are tricked into one-sided "loyalty"). Life is too short to put that much care and effort into making someone else a ton of money.

> Nope. Of course I don't. It's just a job.

This is another signal supporting my thesis.

I am personally convinced that as soon as your job requires a complex and hard activities from your brain - it inevitably touches all its cicruits responsable for our deepest motivations, values etc.

It doesn’t mean you have to be crazy about your job etc, but it means a part of your personality is working towards some common goal too, not just your skills.

And personality tends to be very picky about how it wastes its relatively short lifetime.

Your theory doesn’t work… otherwise why managers are not on-call? You’ll say “because they cannot fix shit if needed”, but the real reason is: on-call sucks, you cannot force managers to do it, but you can force engineers.

I’m in the same situation as OP, and it seems they and I, we are just normal professionals who care about their career, but are not willing to sacrifice our scarce free time in exchange for more money or whatever.

Strong maybe on that from my side. It really depends on where you work. But in every startup I have worked with and have been on call, there was quickly at least a middle manager joined to see if he can provide something of value (in most situations he will for instance call other teams members as needed or coodinate with teams in other timezones).

I think, in the end, it's a bit of both, you need to care about the product to actually do it, but you are also correct in that the tradeoff has to be worth it.

> Your theory doesn’t work… otherwise why managers are not on-call

First it’s not a theory but observations. Many of them.

Second, i dont see how your argument refutes the theory if it was a theory?

Managers may and in fact are usually on call from what I personally have seen. They just have different type of oncall within their areas of competence, and it’s often bat called “oncall”.

Why do you think the real reason is not “because they cannot fix shit if needed”. Seems the most reasonable to me.

At least in my experience, managers (engineering managers, sorry for not being more explicit. I didn’t mean product managers or similar) have a good number of years of experience as software engineers before turning into managers. They are not clueless about the products we built and maintain. So, even if junior engineers are on-call, why on earth an engineer manager with over 10 years of coding experience cannot be on call as well? In my experience, the answer is: because being oncall is shit, and upper management cannot force middle level managers to be on call.

Sounds reasonable but misses the mark, sorry. Once you become a manager you rapidly lose hands on skills. The big picture never goes away, but the details go pretty quick. If you don’t use, you do lose it.

This sounds a bit like: "Having boundaries means that you do not care about your users."

I wonder why is that - is it my bad choice of words?

I personally think quite the opposite: the better you take care of your work hygiene the better you are capable of serving your users.

But if you don’t care about your jobs goals at all - no WLB tricks will last long for you.

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